A well-positioned window, the precursor to the television. I sit in the living room next to my father who is watching HBO during one of their free periods, and I find myself glued to the backyard. The birds have not returned from their blizzard retreating, except for a frat party's worth of robins strutting through the lawn on a bright day last week. The back fence is a zoetrope of cars passing on the hill beyond. I've always been a wistful window watcher. The answer to everything is in the breath. And who breathes without the trees? How can one feel good to leave the trees? I assure you, I do not. The date of my return to my hip, modern life in the big city fast approaches and I feel so much about it. And the trees, are singing.

I FINALLY got one of those cool health problems that I always read about in my favorite old literature. Pleurisy! (an inflammation of layers of tissue that separate the lungs from the chest wall, which causes them to rub against each other when breathing and feels a bit like a knife wound) is something people would come down with in novels of manners and have to rest for a month, often in a coastal town where they could take in the vapors of good health. And I get it. When what I thought was a muscle pain below my pectoral muscle turned into a sensation very much like being shivved for the jailhouse snitch my dreams tell me I am, I woke up to a lot of concern.

Do you ever feel like two distinctly different people? In all honesty I feel like a small village most days, but for example's sake, when I wake up, I am often this slow moving, quiet, patient, contemplative bag of water, while once the sun sets, I am a high energy, giggling, social, vanity-prone bag of water. I am a pretty self-assured person, unless I'm not. Unless I'm a pool of water collecting at the base of a table. Cat paws painting me into little archipelagos.

What is it about the war with the human body? Are you guys aware of the articles w/r/t sitting? Sitting, if current sentiment is to be believed, is killing us (our muscles, our bones, our metabolisms). And working out and eating right won't save us from that billowing, butt-hugging harbinger of death, the couch, and his pestilence swinging sidekick, the ergonomic desk chair. But I find myself crashed upon by wave and wave of trends about what will kill me, feeling worn down, smoothed and polished by time, and am uninterested in keeping more of myself than I need to survive. Modernity is seemingly at odds with history. But this has always been the case. Modernity is new only in branding. Look no further than generational attitudes. ​